BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

There are certain things, that when said aloud, will bring most any conversation to a screeching halt. You know the things I mean. Stuff such as, “Whoops, my hair is on fire…” or “Whoa! Is that Dana Delany over there?”

Personally, I have an intense fondness for the Dana Delany comment, but then we already knew that, right? Well, if you didn’t, you do now… Oops… Guess that was sorta awkward, eh?

The thing is, there are several such phrases that can bring a conversation to a sudden halt. Case in point…

I was prattling on endlessly with my PA the other day. As it happens, the o-spring is out of school for the summer, so she was sitting there fiddling about with her Nook or some such since it is loaded up with a ton of summer reading for her. Since she’s all kinds of brilliant and has a high school level command of the English language, I often forget that she’s still just a tween, so my filters aren’t always in place. In this instance, they weren’t, and I was talking to my PA about Merrie Axemas, and In The Bleak Midwinter, giving him a synopsis of the stories, how they related, differed, and other such nonsense.

Well… Anyone who has read Merrie Axemas knows that there is a dismemberment involved. Merrie. Axe. Mas… You get the idea. So moving right along, as we are talking the o-spring pipes up and says:

“Did you know that when your head is chopped off you still live for eleven more seconds?”

This really shouldn’t – and didn’t – surprise me. After all, she’s my kid… But that’s not the thing that stopped the conversation. I mean, think about it. I research all manner of nastiness for my thriller novels… After all, I write about serial and/or spree killers for the most part. That’s why I’m a member of the HWA, and not the “Grandma’s Cozy Knitting Happily Ever After Ending Whodunit Club”…

But on with the story… you see, since both my PA and I know my kid, we just continued the convo, involving her at this point. Mainly discussing the fact that 11 seconds might be a bit of a stretch, but that there was some evidence to indicate that the brain continued to function very briefly following decapitation.

This then turned to different ways of dying, and before I knew it my PA and my daughter were into a discussion of which way to go would be the least traumatic. They got onto beheading, suffocation, drowning, etc, and I added my two cents, that being the fact that I was under the impression that suffocation wasn’t a particularly pleasant way to go, no matter HOW the suffocation happened. That’s when my PA regaled us with a tale of how he had almost drowned – or come somewhat close – when he was a child, and how it had gone from a fearful struggle to a simple calm… Well, obviously he didn’t drown, or he wouldn’t have been there having weird death conversations with my tween daughter.

But this was when the conversation stopper came.

Darling daughter pipes up, “Yeah, I almost drowned a few years ago.”

You could hear a pin drop. I stared at her. She stared at me. My PA stared at her. She stared at him. We all stared at each other.

Finally I broke down and said, “When was this?”

“A few years ago at blankity-blank pool,” she replied.

“How?”

She shrugged. “It was before I knew how to swim and my friend took me to the deep end and left me there because she didn’t know that I couldn’t swim.”

I stared some more. “Why am I just now hearing about this?”

“I dunno.”

“So, did the lifeguard jump in and save you or something? I mean, it seems to me they would have told us about it when we picked you up from summer day camp.”

“No,” she said. “My friend just took me back to the shallow end.”

“Well, did you start sinking or what? How did you almost drown?”

She thought about it a second and then said, “Well… I might’ve kinda exaggerated…”

Guess I can’t complain. She’s my kid. She got it honest…

More to come…

Murv

…Or am I just happy to see you?

Remember your childhood? No… Not back that far. No need for poopy diapers around here. I fling enough poo for all of us.

I mean like back when you were about 8 to 10… Maybe slightly younger, but not too much. You know, kind of like around the age of kids in those sub sandwich commercials where they have all the adults running around but they have little kid kinda voices…

You haven’t seen those? Well damn… They’re actually kinda funny…

Hmmm… Well just stick with me here and maybe we can work this out.

Back when you were a kid, around 8 to 10, did your parents ever say, “Come on, Rusty (or whatever they called you). We’re going for a ride.” Then, drive for about two hours and eventually boot you out of the car on some lonely country road and then speed off?

Okay, okay so mine didn’t do that to me either.

So, how about this instead: Did they ever hustle you into the car, not telling you where you were going, then listen to you gripe for 20 minutes because you wanted to watch Lassie or The Lone Ranger instead of go somewhere that you didn’t even know where or what it was? And then, after you were really good and bored, and extra grumpy, and were just plain being a kid, they broke the news to you that you were on your way to get a new bike… Or a puppy… Or to see a movie you’d just been dying to see… Or Holiday Hill… Or White Castle… Or swimming… Or any one of a million things that would make a kid go ape-shit excited to the point where they wiggle right out of their Superman Underoos?

Well, unless you had a truly horrible childhood then you probably know what I’m talking about, at least on some level, be it big or small.  If you did have a truly horrible childhood, you have my sympathies…

So anyway, why the hell am I rambling about such inane silliness? Well, you see, sometimes it’s exactly like that for writers. We get started on a manuscript (hustled into the car). We write, and write, and write (gripe and get grouchy because we’d rather be looking at porn… Hey, the other shows have lost their appeal at this point)… and besides, even though the story is good, and the prose we have penned is gripping, the final destination is in the hands of the characters and they haven’t yet given up the secret info…

But then, just like our parents who had tortured us with clandestine car rides only to surprise us with serendipitous banana splits from Velvet Freeze,  our characters choose some arbitrary moment to reveal to us where we are going.

You know, like when we are folding the laundry and ruminating about where to take that next chapter.

And, just like the little kids we were then, we wiggle right out of our  Superman Underoos, giggle, pee ourselves, and get all kinds of cotton candy overload excited.

Yeah… Pretty cool, eh?

So… I guess now that I’ve peed my Superman Underoos I should change. Whaddaya think, Batman or Aquaman?

Of course, there’s always Wonder Woman… But those are really designated for when I’m looking at porn instead of writing…

More to come…

Murv